Wednesday, September 21, 2005

It's a quest, not a commute

Try telling a hiker "you could just drive there" or NASA, "there isn't anything useful on Mars; it's just a big rock with little rocks on it, and a tiny bit of ice. We can make ice in a freezer and we have plenty of rocks here, and even if Mars were made of platinum or gold, the cost of mining it and transporting any of it here would outweigh the benefit by orders of magnitude."

Go ahead, try it. They won't listen. They will ignore you or tell you to shut up and go away. If they're feeling particularly benevolent and your inquiry seems to spring entirely from ignorance, they might just explain to you that the simplistic end result is not what they're after at all.

Needless to say, RFH, while largely ignorant, seemed to be motivated more by a desire to annoy me when he suggested (for like the fifth time) that I use a Windows install CD on Athena. (And yet each time he says it, I'm more and more impressed with the quick wit required to come up with this stuff time and time again. How does he do it?)

You see, I am in the process of installing a 64-bit Linux Kernel and I haven't got the configuration right just yet. It works fine using genkernel, which basically compiles everything as a loadable module and auto-loads what it needs at bootup based on hardware detection. The trouble is I don't want it that way. I want a lean mean kernel with compiled-in support for my hardware.

So, I have two kernels currently, and I can select the one I want to boot from GRUB. If I select my custom-configured one, it immediately blanks the screen (after setting the resolution) and I don't hear from it again. No logging. Nothing.

Well, there's a possibility that it's just taking a while to boot and if I wait a bit I can try and ssh in, but I haven't gotten to that yet. Most likely, though, it's a missing driver. I thought I included the proper modules for my hardware components, but I guess not.

I'm not doing this because it's easy.

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